GAFFNEY: White House caving to Islamic blasphemy agenda

For the past two weeks, the American people have been encouraged by Team Obama — official representatives of the administration, its champions in the press and other partisans — to believe a number of national security calumnies that can be described only as surrealistically epic and dangerous deceptions. Far more than the usual political sleight of hand that can be expected in the run-up to an election, the mendacity of Team Obama is truly audacious, and the consequences of the public accepting it at face value are grave.

Take, for example, President Obama’s insistence that the surging violence in dozens of countries is a “natural” response by Muslims to a video produced in America that trashes Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. One can scarcely find an official or press account of these events that does not start with something to the effect that the attacks were precipitated by that (almost entirely unviewed) short film.

There are several things wrong with this proposition. First, in some places — notably Libya, where an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi resulted in the brutal killing of the American ambassador and three others assigned to that mission — there is no evidence that the film was even a pretext, let alone the real reason for what was, in fact, a disciplined, coordinated and successful act of jihad. In others, it was simply the latest excuse by Islamists to incite crowds to violence, just as Danish cartoons, burned Korans, a speech by the pope and defiled Afghan corpses have been at one time or another.

What this latest campaign of deceit by Team Obama is meant to obscure is its own national security malpractice, namely a dogged refusal to face the reality that America is at war with an enemy that it has been unwilling to name, has failed to counter and is actually emboldening. Such behavior has signaled to jihadists seeking to impose on the rest of us the totalitarian ideology they call Shariah that acts of violence — or even threats of violence — against us will be met with accommodations and concessions whenever the stated justification is outrage over some perceived insult to Islam.

The Obama administration has committed to engage in, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton put it, “old-fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” to discourage such offensive behavior. This is but a milestone along the trajectory of the White House’s acquiescence to the Shariah blasphemy agenda of the Muslim Brotherhood’s state-level counterpart, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

The course of this trajectory is utterly predictable: more violence, followed by more demands for more self-imposed restrictions on free speech, which are justified as necessitated by the national security. This pattern, in turn, translates into a rising perception of our submission to the Islamists’ demands, which encourages another cycle of jihadism, and on and on. What started as the U.S. government’s refusal to understand or even name the enemy for fear of causing offense may soon metastasize into a cowed submission to Shariah — all in the name of “keeping the peace,” of course.

We are likely to be treated to another example of Mr. Obama’s staggering national security disinformation campaign in connection with the U.N. General Assembly meetings in New York this week. The Egyptian president, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi, is expected to use his appearances to repeat his demand that the United States release Omar Abdul Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheikh,” who is a convicted terrorist serving a life sentence in federal prison. The Obama administration wants us to believe that such a step is not under consideration.

Yet, Mrs. Clinton’s State Department gave a visa in June to one of the Blind Sheikh’s fellow terrorists, Hani Nour Eldin. The reason? To facilitate discussions of Mr. Morsi’s demand in meetings at the White House, at the State Department and on Capitol Hill. Andrew McCarthy, who was the federal prosecutor who secured Rahman’s conviction of conspiring to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, warns that despite the administration’s serial and artfully worded denials, Mr. Obama is likely to release the sheikh after the November election.

I have experienced another Obama calumny personally, but it touches every American who speaks clearly about the threat we face. Organizations closely aligned with the White House and supportive of its pandering to Islamists — such as the radical left’s Center for American Progress, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Muslim Public Affairs Council — have taken to vilifying opponents of jihadism.

Without any basis in fact, we have been called everything from “racists” and “bigots” to “Islamophobes.” Our expertise on national security and threats from the Shariah agenda have been denied, basically on the grounds that we have not been approved by the Muslim Brotherhood, attended a madrassa or been trained as Islamist clerics. It has been suggested lately that if anything bad happens involving Muslims and violence, it will be our fault.

This assertion presumably is designed to set the stage for prosecution of the kind we have seen in Europe and Canada on hate speech or other charges consistent with what amount to Shariah blasphemy laws — once our First Amendment rights have been further shredded by Mr. Obama and his team.

Will we really accede to this succession of big lies, with all that portends for our freedom of expression, our situational awareness of the jihadist threat and our ability to resist it? Not if we want to bequeath to our children the America we inherited.

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of Secure Freedom Radio on WRC-AM (1260).

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About the Author

Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of Secure Freedom Radio, heard in Washington weeknights at 9 p.m. on 1260 AM.